She must also adapt to a new set of social and cultural mores. Accustomed to speech, the child has to abandon her chattering and learn the complex system of gestures and movements with which her new community express themselves. She finds herself surrounded by a group of people who not only look very different to herself, and who find her as bizarre and unsettling as she finds them, but who also have an entirely alien concept of communication. Under the care of the clan’s medicine woman Iza, and the protection of their powerful holy man or mog-ur, Creb, the child begins to return to health. Weakened by hunger and loss of blood from an attack by a cave lion, she is providentially discovered by a clan of Neanderthal who, much against their leader’s better judgement, carry her along with them. When a five-year-old girl is orphaned by an earthquake, she finds herself alone and unskilled against the full cruelty of nature and the elements. In the aftermath of The Inheritors, I decided it was time to make a start on this other famous story about contact between Neanderthal man and the new race of Homo sapiens. And now, twenty years later, I’ve finally got round to it. I remember being very impressed by the thick novels she was carrying around, and decided that I would have to read the books myself one day.

Among her films is Shooting Fish.In our first years at secondary school, one of my classmates was much taken with the Earth’s Children series by Jean M. Rowena Cooper's many stage credits include Bird Calls, The Daughter-in-Law and The House of Bernarda Alba, while among her TV appearances are The Bill, Down to Earth, Spaced, Playing the Field, Midsomer Murders, State of Mind and A is for Acid. With the publication of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first novel in her Earth's Children® sequence, she achieved unprecedented critical and commercial success which has continued to the present day. He will do all he can to destroy her, but Ayla is a survivor.

Full of curiosity, interest and rebelliousness, she does not always obey the Clan's rules and so she makes an implacable enemy of the group's future leader, Broud. Iza teaches her how to find food and the healing skills known only to her line, but Ayla must also learn the ways of the Clan. Ayla is cared for by the Clan's medicine woman Iza and its wise holy man Creb. Ayla is a courageous and indomitable young woman whose story begins when she is a five-year-old orphan adopted by the Clan, a group of Neanderthal people.

Jean auel clan of the cave bear